Account-based marketing (ABM) strategy focuses on creating personalised buying experiences for high-value accounts. It allows you to filter out less- valuable accounts and engage accounts that are more profitable for the company.
ABM is different from other marketing strategies and requires new metrics to track progress. ABM focuses on engaging a small group of right leads. Hence, lead generation metrics such as cost per lead, clickthrough rates, cost per impressions etc. are not going to be suitable for tracking your ABM campaigns.
In order to successfully track your Account-based marketing strategies, you will have to update your measurement approach suitable for new goals.
Account-based marketing metrics are different in the following ways:
- ABM focuses more on the quality rather than the quantity. ABM’s priority is focusing on key accounts that matter more. It focuses on engaging a smaller number of right leads. Hence traditional funnel metrics such as conversion rates do not matter much.
- ABM is geared more toward tracking progress throughout the funnel. Due to the longer B2B sales cycle there is a big gap between top funnel and bottom funnel. Engagement can be tracked to determine the progress in between these two ends. Track how interested the right people are and if they engage with your brand. This will help you get insights into the development of a long sales cycle.
Now, let's look at the five key categories of metrics that you should include while tracking your ABM strategy.
Data Coverage
Once you have created your target account list the first thing you want to ensure is if you have the right people in your database and how complete is your account data. This is not about quantity but rather the quality of your data. It is about updating your data quality and relevance to ensure that throughout the ABM process you are focused on the right target accounts.
The coverage metric should also include additional insights along with basic contact information. This metric tracks your data quality and completeness and should provide valuable details for your strategy. You can find out the number of target accounts you have researched, how many accounts do you have account-specific content for or if you have identified the key stakeholders in every account. Assessing all these aspects can help you find any gaps in your database.
Awareness
Are your prospects aware of your company’s name and what products or services you offer?Brand awareness is an important metric to track when it comes to your Account-based marketing strategy. Even if your brand has sophisticated products or services, creating brand awareness among your target audience is quite a task. In any marketing strategy awareness is usually a tricky metric to measure quantitatively. Even though ABM focuses more on the quality it still has to measure quantity here.
There are many ways to track website traffic. Two ways to track awareness in case of ABM can be through website traffic and target account interactions. Web analytics show you the amount of direct traffic coming to your website. Analysing the growth of this traffic over a certain period of time can give you insight into your brand awareness growth.
Along with the growth, pay attention to bounce rate as it will show you if the people interested in your brand are actually investing time in it. Through account interactions you can track how often your target accounts are interacting with your marketing or sales teams by opening your emails, taking your phone calls or attending events.
Engagement
Tracking engagement will help you determine how interested your prospects are in your company. The more time they spend with your company the more loyal they are. Measure the amount of time they spend with your brand. Track how much time they spend on your website, when they engage with your content, interact on social platforms or when they talk to your sales teams. This will also help you understand how relevant your content is to your prospects.
The key strategy here is to create personalised content that resonates with your audience. This metric can help you see if your content is successfully keeping your audience interested. How many blog posts have your target audience looked at? Are they reaching out and engaging with your sales teams? Which accounts are engaging more? You can look into these areas in order to measure engagement.
Reach
There are various approaches you can take in Account-based marketing. You can take the narrow approach where you only measure a select group of accounts. If you find the conversion rates decreasing you can take a mid-level approach where you target a higher level of accounts. The third approach is similar to lead generation where you cast a wide net to reach as many audiences as possible.
Through this metric you can measure if you are reaching the right accounts and not wasting your efforts, regardless of the approach you take. Tracking reach is about finding the waste in your ABM strategy. For example, personalized content is key in ABM. You can find out if your personalized e-books are more successful than your webinars.
You can focus on channels that are more useful. For instance, if you have a webinar campaign you can track the attendance of your audience. You need to evaluate various aspects of your marketing campaigns, which will gradually help you determine the most successful ways to reach your target accounts.
Influence
This category helps you determine whether your Account-based marketing activities are influencing sales outcomes or not. From the metrics mentioned above you will find out which accounts you are covering, how engaged they are and which channels work the best. In this metric you can determine which activities actually impacted the buyer’s journey.
You can take a look at marketing activities with metrics like win rates, retention, deal velocity and customer satisfaction. When you experiment with various ABM tactics you can determine what generates the best results for your business. With the help of these insights you can update and optimize your strategies to generate more profitable results.
Account-based marketing strategies provide great opportunities for organizations to make their marketing and sales efforts more effective and relevant. And to really take advantage of these benefits it is important to measure what matters. Having the right data will help you maximize the performance of your marketing activities.
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